"The Bullet gem is designed to help you increase your application’s performance by reducing the number of queries it makes. It will watch your queries while you develop your application and notify you when you should add eager loading (N+1 queries), when you’re using eager loading that isn’t necessary and when you should use counter cache."

"In the golden age of BASIC, it was easy for anyone to write a program. Now we offer you this exact same capability, but this time with the advanced features of the Nintendo DSi™ system… Many programs are included to ensure that you can fully enjoy using BASIC. The included programs were also written in BASIC, so you can add new features to them in order to enhance your games. You can also take the programs and data you create and convert them to QR codes that can be shared with friends who also have Petit Computer on their Nintendo DSi systems. (Programs included: 12 feature samples,5games, a character picture tool,a background screen creation tool,a graphics tool,and a picture-drawing tool.)" Interesting – especially the music-creation stuff, as Create Digital Music proved.

"Millions and millions and millions of people also love Gregory's Girl and OMD and Brookside and Underworld and Evelyn Glennie and the shipping forecast and that is deeply joyous and important." Yep, that.

"If you're trying to celebrate a nation's identity, you have to take things that are familiar parts of the landscape and make them wonderful. On to the wall went GK Chesteron's great aphorism: "The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder."" Lots of good thoughts from Frank Cottrell Boyce here.

"Kittydar is short for kitty radar. Kittydar takes an image (canvas) and tells you the locations of all the cats in the image."

"My next book is even stranger than my last. It's an entire book, 65,000+ words worth, about a single-line Commodore 64 BASIC program that is inscribed in the book's title, '10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10'… Despite it's relatively simple form and structure, the program produces a surprisingly intricate maze pattern using the C64's unique PETSCII graphical characters. The book discusses many aspects of this feat from different perspectives, including the history of mazes, porting, randomness, the BASIC language, and the Commodore 64 platform. It's interspersed with short "remarks" (get it, BASIC dorks?), among them discussions of assembly, the demoscene, and a variety of ports, including one I somehow wrote to run on the Atari 2600." I would like to buy this book.

"This simple gesture was as touching as if the art school had put up a banner saying 'Welcome Back Tom'. I was moved. The project's title has now been reinstated. In some special sense I had arrived" Lovely.

"Not all shooter violence is violent per se. As the game critic Erik Kain notes, "killing people in video games is actually just solving moving puzzles." Which is a true, smart, and helpful way to think about video-game violence. However, most puzzles don't bleed or scream. Why do gamers want their puzzles to bleed and scream? And why on earth do they — do we — also want our bleeding, screaming puzzles to be embedded within a nuanced story?" This is subtle, nuanced writing about an oft-repeated topic; the subtlety is what makes this good. Also, his list of "shooters that handle violence well" is pretty much the same as mine – Metro 2033 was one of the most striking games I played this year.

"The whole memorial, appropriately horizontal and about as long as a modestly sized human being, is to be installed in early August on the wall of the College's dissecting room." Beautiful, as ever.

"Basically Lion handles .local TLDs differently to Snow Leopard. Whenever I would try to access my phpMyAdmin installation at http://xampp.local/phpMyAdmin, Lion would take a ridiculously long time to resolve the host and it probably has something to do with the Multicast DNS feature of Bonjour." What the hell? That explains a lot.

Really beautiful, and a nice reminder of how robust installation design can be. Also: music by Todd Terje!